Jolla – what is happening now?

Just realized it has been quite silent around #Jolla lately. What is happening in the silence?

Markets

In February this year Jolla released Sailfish OS 1.0 and told it is ready to scale up globally. One part of silence from my radar screen could be the fact that Jolla has been focusing in other markets out side Europe. Now Europe is covered, but product is not catching the attention of audience. New markets mentioned are India, Hong Kong and Kazakhstan. I don’t know anything about marketing, but i would say that Jolla has to be louder to.

Renewing life cycle of existing android devices with Sailfish OS

Jolla told in February too that “users can soon start to enjoy the modern, gesture based Sailfish OS in selected Android devices and also The Sailfish community has already ported Sailfish OS into several devices including major versions of popular Samsung Galaxy, Google Nexus, and Sony Xperia.” This could be interesting approach. I suppose many android users have experienced the same as I that phones get slower as they grow older. Old versions cannot carry the load created by new versions of Android OS, so why not do the same you have done with old computers: put in lighter OS and continue using them. According to press release this downloadable OS should be available during first half of 2014. Although i have not yet seen this happening in my surroundings. There is some guidance available how to do it like in xdadevelopers. If installation process is made smooth this could work well, but with current approach it will only reach dedicated enthusiasts. Lacking visibility is also making it hard to get it popular.

Second half

Not much to say about this. Two co-operations have been announced: Angry Birds and Makia. Later one is promoting a clothing brand. Neither of these are available in Jolla’s own store, so i did not even search further. This was promising idea, but no implementations visible yet, except couple of different color themes. Hopefully some clever expansions will appear into market soon.

Stella Launcher

I don’t actually get the basic idea behind this resent launch. I see the promotional side to get Jolla into good company of Angry Birds, but other reasons behind this remain unclear. Only idea is that Jolla’s great user experience is tried to utilize in other android devices. So does this mean that Sailfish is moving towards gaming platform instead of being an innovative operating system?

All in all: I see it is moving, but in order to realized that i had take the effort to look it carefully. Then one might ask, if it is moving too slow or too much behind the scenes?